Successfully Speaking: Strategic life plan provides control over success

Jane Sanders has expertise in gender communication, authentic leadership for women, strategic life planning, presentation skills, and meeting facilitation.

All of us are too busy and distracted to reach well-rounded happiness and success in our professional and personal life without a plan. Developing a strategic life plan is not terribly difficult, but it does require discipline, reflection and commitment. Keep in mind that the choices and decisions you make every day, both large and small, determine the quality of your life and your potential for the future.

A plan will take the guesswork out of those decisions and, for the first time, enable you to take deep and meaningful control of your life. If you get stuck, and people do, find a book, seminar or speaker to help you through the process. But get started! Heres how:

Write a 30-second commercial for yourself, to tune in to who you are. Get creative and have fun! If you were for sale, how would you articulate your character, best qualities and talents?

Identify your core values, the six to eight key operating principles that guide and govern your professional and personal life. They define the essence of who you are, your character. These values (along with the outcomes of the two steps that follow this one) can help guide every decision you make. Some core value options to consider include: integrity, family, spirituality, wealth, health, service and personal growth.

Discover your purpose, which is your ongoing inner desire, a way of living and contributing, and a passion that feels rewarding and deeply meaningful. How do you want to make a difference? It may take time to identify and develop your purpose, so be patient with your many versions.

For example, Carla, a 35-year-old corporate meeting planner, articulated her purpose as: to create and implement innovative, high-value meetings that help attendees become the best people they can be, professionally and personally.

Develop your vision statement, which describes who you will be and what you want to be known for, personally and professionally, in 10 to 15 years. A vision statement is bigger and bolder than you currently are, and must seem unbelievable today. Carlas vision is to be a vice president in a Springfield-based large company earning over $80,000 whose responsibilities include authority over all meetings and events.

Identify goals in major life areas, by reflecting on where you want to be in five years with career, health, family, relationships, finances, spirituality and serving others.

Be visionary and optimistic, yet also realistic. No part of your plan is written in stone, including your values, purpose and vision. My five-year goals for health include losing and keeping off five pounds, and enjoying two vacations a year. Carlas five-year career goals include being promoted to director, increasing her staff by two people and securing a 20 percent salary increase.

Determine strategies for each goal and, very importantly, the time frame. Strategies are the leaps the big how-tos that will lead you to the achievement of your goals. To reach my health goals, my strategies include maintaining an appropriate vitamin supplement plan (ongoing), and building more lean muscle (by 2/29/04).

Identify specific action steps for each strategy, and again include deadlines. Action steps are the little how-tos required to complete each strategy.

Carlas action steps for developing an evaluation process involve getting approval (9/30/03), researching other similar processes using the Internet and contacts in other companies (10/15/03), creating the first draft (10/31/03), finalizing her recommendations (11/15/03), and presenting for approval (11/20/03).

Yes, this is a lot of work. Yes, it will take time. And yes, you owe it to yourself! You will be astounded at the power of your strategic life plan.

Remember to keep your strategic life plan handy for easy reference, and review it every quarter to make any necessary adjustments, just like you would a strategic business plan. With this work complete, just make some revisions and roll what life brings into your plan.

To paraphrase one of my heroes, Eleanor Roosevelt, the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams and develop a plan to achieve them.